Review: Sky in the Deep by Adrienne Young

Hey all, Dani here.

Look everyone, it is an ARC review. I feel like a cool book blogger now. Just kidding, I usually feel like a decently cool book blogger, and that’s because I have so many of you wonderful people following my blog and enjoying my posts. I haven’t been doing as many book reviews as I would like lately, but that’s okay. Sometimes we need to step back a bit. But, I’m actually spending some time scheduling and writing up reviews of all of my backlog books, so you can expect a lot of reviews coming over the next couple months.

Anyway, let’s stop rambling and start talking about this awesome book I devoured. Oh, I almost forgot, I also need to say thank you to the publisher, Wednesday Books, for sending me an ARC of this book. This did not affect my review in any way; Sky in the Deep was one of my most anticipated releases for 2018 because it sounded amazing.

Summary

OND ELDR. BREATHE FIRE.

Raised to be a warrior, seventeen-year-old Eelyn fights alongside her Aska clansmen in an ancient rivalry against the Riki clan. Her life is brutal but simple: fight and survive. Until the day she sees the impossible on the battlefield—her brother, fighting with the enemy—the brother she watched die five years ago.

Faced with her brother’s betrayal, she must survive the winter in the mountains with the Riki, in a village where every neighbor is an enemy, every battle scar possibly one she delivered. But when the Riki village is raided by a ruthless clan thought to be a legend, Eelyn is even more desperate to get back to her beloved family.

She is given no choice but to trust Fiske, her brother’s friend, who sees her as a threat. They must do the impossible: unite the clans to fight together, or risk being slaughtered one by one. Driven by a love for her clan and her growing love for Fiske, Eelyn must confront her own definition of loyalty and family while daring to put her faith in the people she’s spent her life hating.

My Thoughts

Rating: 5 stars

Okay, so on the back cover of the ARC this book is described as part Wonder Woman and part Vikings. I have not watched Vikings so I can’t exactly speak to how true that statement is, but I can say that what I got was a story about a badass female warrior who goes through a journey that tests how she thinks of both family and loyalty.

Literally this book opens with the characters going to battle, so it is a pretty action packed beginning. That aspect alone quickly grabbed my interest,and I just wanted to keep reading. Then Eelyn was taken by the Riki, the enemy clan, and the story really started to fly by from there.

I was seriously so hooked by this book. I didn’t want to go back to work and I didn’t want to have to put the book down for hours at a time. But being a proper adult and having a job and chores and errands to run sometimes gets in the way of reading time.

I very much enjoyed the characters and seeing how the relationships changed and developed as the story progressed. This might be one of my favorite reads of 2018 so far. I guess my only complaint is that everything wrapped up in just one book. When I got 30 or so pages from the end, I started to convince myself that this had to be the first book of a duology, and I would have been completely happy if that had been the case. But everything ended up concluding in the remaining pages, and so now I am left wondering what Adrienne Young will write next, because I am definitely adding her to my list of authors to keep an eye on.

Where to Buy

You can pre-order this book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-million, Book Depository, or your local indie bookstore. It will be released very soon, on April 24th.